Job Burn-out

In Europe, most employers guarantee a month of holiday time along with all national holidays and bank holidays. They work shorter hours and weeks and yet get more done than Americans do and have time to spend 3 hours at dinner in the evenings. THey walk their children to school, take long lunches, and come back refreshed and ready to focus their time and energy again. Why don't we do this? Why am I only given an hour lunch per day and two weeks of vacation time per year? Why is our maternity leave shorter by eight to ten months than European maternity leaves? And they wonder why we suffer higher turnovers and less job satisfaction.

In the perfect world you would show up to work refreshed because you didn't have to be there until later, because you would never dream of taking your work home with you or working overtime, and because you just came off a month long holiday in the French Riviera. You would take longer Christmas breaks and when you decided to have a baby, take advantage of the full year's maternity leave that comes with that, so you would really get to know your baby and go back to work satisfied that you were making the right decisions for yourself and your baby. You would take two hour lunches on a regular basis and be there to retrieve your children after school and walk them home. You would pick up dinner from the market on the way home.

Instead I'm working a forty hour week (average) and taking one hour lunch breaks. I'm tired and burned out but can't take any vacation days right now because I want to make sure and have enough this summer when I go on vacation- for one week. I'm beginning to wonder if it's the job wearing down on me but then dont want to know because there aren't that many jobs out there for recent college grads right now and I'm lucky to have anything at all. I spend my days working myself as hard as I can, then get to the gym and home to cook dinner and take care of my little cat. I am mindless after work, able to sit in front of the TV or read awful novels before literally passing out in bed and waking up the next morning to NPR just to do it all over again. I've begun counting down the days until Friday, hoping the week will go fast enough to prevent me from having to deal with anything at all.

How do you know when it's time for a career change or when you're just tired and need a break? What are the signs that you should start hunting for other job opportunities versus sitting in an office all day waiting for something to change?